23 May 2018 3:07 PM

I was amused this morning by the contrast in coverage, in different outlets, of Oxford University’s latest figures on its struggle to satisfy the diversity fanatics.

Such people believe that our great universities should alter their entrance requirements in the cause of diversity, so as to achieve equality of outcome.

This view has, in recent years become pretty much universal, and I’ll come to that later. What those who accede to it do not realise is that, once they do so, they will still never actually satisfy these demands.

The Daily Telegraph headlined its report ‘A fifth of Oxford enrolments are now black or ethnic students’. You would have thought this was good news for the diversity campaigners, whose preoccupation with skin colour greatly troubles a sixties veteran such as me . We chanted – and believed - that there was ‘One Race – the Human Race’, and were appalled by South Africa’s system of racial classification based upon colour. While I understand that the modern state’s use of a parallel classification has a wholly different purpose, I still find it disturbing.

The Telegraph (publishing Oxford University’s new full disclosure of its admissions figures), reported that last year the number of Oxford students classed as ‘Black and ethnic minority rose to 17.9%, up from 13.9% four years ago.

In another triumph for equality of outcome, it was revealed more than six in 10 Oxford students were from state schools, said to be the highest level in the university’s history. I am not sure if this claim s true. By the mid-1960s, grammar schools and direct-grant schools were sending an ever-increasing number of pupils to Oxford, reaching 51% in 1965 (recorded in the Franks Report of 1966). In the brief remaining years during which these excellent state schools still existed in large numbers, it is quite possible that state school admissions reached 58%. Certainly my university, York, had a huge number of grammar school entrants when I started there in 1970, probably the last year in which there were still enough grammars and direct grants to achieve this effect. But I know of no Oxford statistics on this after 1966.

The Independent put it slightly differently, saying ‘A report by the institution found the proportion of UK undergraduates from disadvantaged areas was 11 per cent in 2017. This was an increase from 7 per cent in 2013, the Annual Admissions Statistical Report showed.

‘The proportion of students identifying as black and minority ethnic was 18 per cent last year, up from 14 per cent in 2013. There was a slight increase in the number of admissions from state schools during the same period, from 57 per cent to 58 per cent.’

The Times, in a strange, oblique story about how privileged Oxford students now seem to study geography, noted that ‘David Lammy, Labour MP for Tottenham, was instrumental in Oxford’s decision to release its admissions data annually from today. He spent years using freedom of information requests to build a picture of who gets a place.

But Mr Lammy was not - of course - satisfied by the news. He said the report had several key omissions, including data on how many students were drawn from the richest 20 per cent of households and how many of the state school students were from grammar school. Oxford said it did not have these breakdowns.

But why does Mr Lammy want to know? So that he can call for the opening of more grammars as they do so well? Somehow I doubt it).

Oxford, rather reasonably, pointed out that the proportion of black students was above the 1.8 per cent of black A-level students who get three ‘A’ grades [at ‘A’ level], generally essential for Oxford entrance.

But the most striking coverage came in the Guardian, which gave the story its most prominent position, and presented it as a failure by Oxford. The print edition headlined it ‘Oxford faces anger over failure to improve diversity among students’ – a line of attack more or less completely followed by the BBC’s Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme.

It opened : ‘Oxford’s glacial progress in attracting students from diverse backgrounds has been revealed in figures showing that more than one in four of its colleges failed to admit a single black British student each year between 2015 and 2017.

Several of the most prestigious colleges, including Balliol, University and Magdalen, each admitted two black British students as undergraduates during the three-year period.

The worst figures belonged to Corpus Christi College, which admitted a single black British student in those three years and attracted a dozen such applications.

Overall, white British applicants were twice as likely to be admitted to undergraduate courses as their black British peers – 24% of the former gained entry and 12% of the latter.’

I’d make a couple of comments about the above figures. It is extremely difficult for *anyone* to get into Oxford, from any sort of school. Oxford and Cambridge annually reject thousands of applicants from state and private schools, whose A level results are excellent.

Oxford’s point, that ‘the proportion of black students was above the 1.8 per cent of black A-level students who get three ‘A’ grades [at ‘A’ level],’ seems to me to destroy at a blow any suggestion that some sort discrimination is at work here.

As for the figures of black students at individual colleges, these seem to me to be indicative of nothing much. If you researched the presence, in individual colleges, of any other group of applicants which formed 1.8% of qualified applicants, you would find low numbers of that group in some colleges, and none at all in others. The colleges vary greatly in size.

I am told that there are also one or two other measurable factors – black students tend to apply for the vocational courses that are hardest to get into. And disproportionately large numbers of black students fail to meet the required grades after getting offers.

These facts may indicate problems in the school system, but they do not reveal discrimination at Oxford itself.

Now, many people genuinely believe that Oxford and Cambridge should deal with this problem by making special exceptions and exemptions.

I am not one of them. I don’t think I need to go into *all* the possible reasons. I have one main one. Oxford and Cambridge are good because they are hard to get into. Those who can get past their selection are more likely to benefit from the courses they offer than those who cannot. Of course, those who fall behind in education through no fault of their own deserve and need help, but an undergraduate course is really too late in life for such remedial action. The effect of monitoring Oxbridge colleges for diversity will be to turn these great universities into comprehensive universities, just like the rest of our failed education system, so making them worse.

If we want our great universities to be fairer, without damaging them, then we have to do something about schools, in my view both in primary schools and in secondaries, before disadvantages solidify into permanence . I have in fact put thus point to Professor Louise Richardson, the University Vice-Chancellor, when I sat at the same table as her at an Oxford dinner a couple of years ago. I told her about the amazing success of the grammar and direct grant schools, in winning places at Oxford in the 1950s and 1960s. I even followed up our conversation by sending her a brief note, giving her the research references for these facts. Alas, I have seen no sign since that she is interested. This is a great pity. Voices such as hers could turn the tide in this debate.

It is only because the telescoped grades of the GCSE and the diluted ‘A’ level replaced the fierce grading of the old pre-1965 O and A levels, that Oxbridge can set three ‘A’ grades as the necessary minimum. Three ‘A’ grades at ‘A’ level in 1965 was, if not unheard of, pretty uncommon.

When I was at school it was often stated, and I believe it to have been true, that a set of English ‘A’ levels were more or less equivalent to an American university degree. There was a thing called the Brain Drain, under which American employers came to this country to recruit our graduates because they were so far ahead of Americans of the same age.

The decision to introduce comprehensive education was falsely sold as ‘grammar schools for all’ because Labour knew perfectly well that grammar schools were popular and people liked them. In its 1959 manifesto, Labour fibbed : ‘…we shall get rid of the 11-plus examination. The Tories say this means abolishing the grammar schools. On the contrary, it means that grammar-school education will be open to all who can benefit by it.’ (My emphasis) In 1964, Labour equally falsely stated in its manifesto ‘Within the new system, grammar school education will be extended: in future no child will he denied the opportunity of benefiting from it through arbitrary selection at the age of 11.’ (My emphasis). We now have arbitrary selection at 11 by parental wealth, and in any case comprehensive standards are way below those of grammars in 1964.

The House of Commons Library recently produced a briefing paper comparing school exam performance in the year 2014-15. On the key measure of the percentage achieving five or more GCSEs at grades A* to C, including English and Maths, grammars achieved 96.7 per cent.

The average for all state schools was 58.1 per cent. That was, interestingly, also the average for all independent schools. For comprehensives it was 56.7 per cent. For the (wrongly despised) secondary moderns, it was 49.7 per cent. Note the rather small difference between secondary moderns and comprehensives, which we were told would be so much better, thanks to some strange magical cargo-cult process through which destroying grammars would bring benefits to those who could not go to them.

What we actually have is secondary moderns for all, except the rich. And these glorified secondary moderns (nowadays known as ‘academies’) feed their pupils into second-rate universities, for which they must pay large fees and become indebted, , while often denying them the vocational education they really need.

Academic selection in secondary schools would benefit the primary schools which prepared children for that selection, and the universities which received their pupils. Standards would rise for all, and the children of the poor, whatever the colour of their skin, would have a far greater chance of achieving full use of their talents than they can dream of now. By the way, has anyone done any work on how many children from what is called the ‘white working class’ are getting into Oxford? That might be interesting.

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15 April 2018 1:31 AM

Why do so many people in politics and the media want to start wars? Since I toured a sordid hospital full of wounded people in Bucharest at Christmas 1989, and even more after I saw for the first time (in Vilnius in 1991) what a human head looks like after a bullet has passed through it, I have seen it as an absolute duty to warn against armed conflict. It is a filthy thing.

No doubt there are times when we must fight. But there are plenty more when we should not.

Any fool can kill a man in a second and ruin a city in a week. But it takes long years of nurture to raise a child to adulthood, and centuries to build a civilisation.

Yet I look around me and see the mouths of intelligent people opened wide, yelling for an attack on Syria, when the only certain outcome of that will be blood and screams and ruins, and the deaths of innocents in 'collateral damage'. What good will this do?

What is wrong with them? They are not cruel and stupid, yet they call for actions which are both.

Haven't we got enough misery in Syria already? The place is a mass of ruins, graveyards and refugee camps. To what end? The only mercy for Syria will come when the war ends, yet we seek to widen and extend it.

Don't we have more than enough of such disaster in Iraq and Libya, where state-sponsored panic and emotional claims of atrocities excused the launching of wars so stupid and dangerous that I wonder if these places can ever recover?

Perhaps worse, by creating an unending river of migrants through the Middle East and the Mediterranean, I suspect they have ruined Europe for good.

Why are we even taking sides in Syria? As Julian Lewis MP, chairman of the Defence Select Committee, rightly pointed out last week, President Assad is a monster. But his opponents are maniacs.

The Syrian jihadi gangsters which our Government crazily helps and backs – the Al-Nusra Front and Jaish al-Islam – are the sort of fanatics we would arrest on sight if we found them in Birmingham.

Anyway, Boris Johnson's Foreign Office is firmly pro-monster in all parts of the world where it suits it to be so.

British Royals and Ministers literally bow down as they accept medals from the head-chopping fanatics of Saudi Arabia, now engaged in a bloody, aggressive war in Yemen.

Britain maintains a naval base in Bahrain, whose rulers in 2011 crushed protests with severe violence followed by torture.

As Amnesty International puts it, 'using an array of tools of repression, including harassment, arbitrary detention and torture, the government of Bahrain has managed to crush a formerly thriving civil society and reduced it to a few lone voices who still dare to speak out'.

Britain daren't even admit that our 'friend' Egypt is ruled by a military junta that seized power illegally in defiance of elections which we had supposedly supported but which produced the wrong result.

Field Marshal Sisi's August 2013 Cairo massacre, in which almost 600 peaceful protesters were killed and thousands more wounded, is politely forgotten.

So is the Chinese communist regime's mass murder (1,000 are estimated to have died) in Peking in June 1989.

The men whose power rests on that ruthless massacre are welcome to dine at Buckingham Palace. But surely we can't allow Assad to use chemical weapons?

We would never tolerate that. Would we? Well, when Saddam Hussein was our ally against Iran back in 1988, he undoubtedly used poison gas against Kurds in Halabja.

And in September 1988 the Foreign Office declined to get outraged, saying: 'We believe it better to maintain a dialogue with others if we want to influence their actions.

Punitive measures such as unilateral sanctions would not be effective in changing Iraq's behaviour over chemical weapons, and would damage British interests to no avail.'

Which brings me to the final point. Do we even know that Assad used chemical weapons?

I have actually read the reports of the last such alleged attack in Khan Sheikhoun a year ago, and they prove nothing. In fact, they are quite fishy.

At the time of writing, I have yet to see a British or US media report on this alleged attack from closer than Beirut, 70 miles from the scene.

Many seemingly confident and graphic accounts come from Istanbul, 900 miles away, or from London or Washington.

Where are they getting their information from? Here's a clue. The Saudi-backed faction in control of Douma at the time of the alleged attack, Jaish al- Islam (the Army of Islam), were themselves accused of using poison gas against Kurds in Aleppo in April 2016.

They are not especially nice. Their other main claim to fame is that they displayed captured Syrian Army officers in cages and used them as human shields.

They have spent several years indiscriminately shelling Damascus from Douma, having taken the local inhabitants hostage, and then squawking about war crimes if the Syrian government hit back at them, which it did much as the Iraqi government (our friends) did to Islamic State in Mosul and Fallujah.

I would not look for any heroes in this cauldron. And if you want to watch war games on a TV screen, can I suggest that you buy your own virtual reality equipment?

The real thing may look pretty and neat, but real people die as it happens and, if you supported it, their deaths will be on your conscience.

****

Is there any better illustration of the huge Soviet-style revolution we have suffered than this moving picture of nurses in an NHS hospital, praying before the start of their shift, half a century ago?

Nursing and hospitals themselves are more or less a Christian invention – the beautiful 15th Century hospital in Beaune in France is an early example.

Yet now open displays of Christianity in the NHS are risky, as they offend against the state creed of 'Equality and Diversity' under which Christians are an embarrassing, outdated nuisance.

Likewise, Ealing Council's ban on peaceful protests outside an abortion clinic overturns the whole legal and moral system of this country.

Doctors and nurses trained to save and protect life are instead employed to snuff life out.

Many women suffer this procedure under pressure from selfish men. Many others have never had the alternatives explained to them.

While this goes on, thousands of childless couples yearn to adopt but find the procedure increasingly difficult, while abortions are signed off by officialdom with barely a second thought.

Why? Mainly, it is because the killing of almost 200,000 babies a year sustains a vast industry employing thousands, many of them very well paid, and they don't like criticism.

Despite claiming to be 'pro-choice', they don't want anyone drawing attention to that choice.

****

Modern alleged artists such as Tracey Emin long to be attacked by people like me. The loathing of conservative suburbanites actually adds value to their stunts.

But now that Ms Unmade Bed has openly announced that her silly pink illuminated scribble, at St Pancras is pro-EU propaganda, shouldn't it be taken down? Aren't there rules against political advertising in such places?

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

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08 April 2018 1:22 AM

Actually, I wish the police would arrest people for defending their homes more often than they already do. It might finally alert the great complacent middle of British politics and opinion to what has happened in this country, so that they eject the people who are responsible, and achieve real change.

It might introduce more law-abiding people to the truth, that our country has been hijacked by elitist dolts, that one key result of this is that the police are not our friends any more, and that they do not serve justice in any way that we understand it.

The most contemptible voice in the midst of these events is that of David Gauke, the ridiculously entitled ‘Justice Secretary’, who claims to be on the side of homeowners against burglars. Oh really, Mr Gauke? Not unless you resign from your politically correct Ministry and your soppy party, you aren’t. Is it possible that you can be so ignorant about the workings of the state you claim to run?

The arrest of Richard Osborn-Brooks after the death of a burglar in his house is in fact a completely typical example of our Left-infiltrated police in operation. There is no point getting cross about it if you do not then demand a total reform of the police and the courts.

No doubt most police officers are perfectly nice men and women, who love animals and are kind to their mothers. But they do not work for us. They work for a state that has been taken over by 1960s radicals.

Have you ever asked why the police are so keen to arrest respectable people who defend their own houses? In general, they do not much want to meet the respectable classes. They have closed hundreds of police stations, and ceased regular foot patrols.

They have great trouble answering the telephone. If they appear in public at all, they do so in pairs, deep in conversations about overtime and clearly not wanting to be interrupted or distracted. They can’t conceal how bored they are by burglary and car theft.

They are unwilling to do anything serious about anti-social behaviour and defeatist on drugs. But defend yourself or your home with any vigour, and they are there in large numbers waving handcuffs and DNA swabs.

Meanwhile, in our capital city homicides rise, seemingly uncontrollably, to levels (so far this year) rivalling those in New York. These figures, unlike those for other crimes, cannot be concealed or massaged out of existence.

They tell a rotten truth about our whole country, that bad people daily grow more confident, and good people daily grow more scared. The answer to this puzzle is simple.

The police of this country are at their most enthusiastic when they are defending their monopoly against the danger of competition. It would be disastrous for them if anyone else started enforcing laws in the way most people want them enforced.

Any sign of old-fashioned law and order, and it must be stamped out swiftly, in case it catches on and puts their failed nationalised industry out of business.

For 50 years now, they have been pursuing fashionable, mad theories about crime, which were stupid when they were first suggested, and are stupider still now that they have been shown, in grim detail, to have utterly failed.

These theories are all based on the batty idea that criminals are not responsible for their own actions, and crime is not caused by human wickedness and greed, nor by lack of fear of being caught and punished.

Government and police alike think that crime is the result of bad social conditions, child abuse or one of the many forms of ‘discrimination’ of which we are all guilty.This is why people who do bad things are seldom punished.

With a very few exceptions, they are repeatedly let off, cautioned, cautioned again, given social workers to make excuses for them, fined, allowed not to pay those fines, fined again, let off again, given community service which they do not do, let off, given bail, not locked up when they commit new offences on bail, given bail again. They become the terror of their neighbours.

Then they are given suspended prison sentences which are not activated when they reoffend.

Eventually, after many years of this, when they have become career criminals and are beyond all hope of redemption, they may be sent to prisons which are run by the inmates, and almost immediately released again with tags round their ankles, which are not monitored.

Equally stupid commercial products and fashions from this era – such as flared trousers for men and Watneys Red Barrel – have long ago vanished from general sale and would be greeted with mockery and astonishment if anyone tried to reintroduce them.

But the liberal reforms of the 1960s – which, unlike flared trousers and keg beer, have done actual, real damage to society – live on unchanged.

The remedies are all simple: for example, the restoration of preventive regular police foot patrols, the repeal of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act and its pro-criminal codes of practice, the enforcement of the laws against drug possession, the return of the policy of ‘due punishment of responsible persons’ to the prisons.

The Left-wing purges of judges and magistrates, pursued furiously during the Blair years, also need to be reversed.

But who will do these things? Nobody, as long as the British law-abiding classes continue to rely on the political leadership which has made such a mess of this country for the past half century.

In which case it is a matter of time until somebody else – perhaps it will be you – is arrested by some wooden-faced plod for daring to defend his home against savage thieves.

*****

Theresa May has once again demonstrated that she is the new Harriet Harman, not the new Margaret Thatcher. Her ridiculous enthusiasm for last week’s frenzy about a ‘gender pay gap’, and her claim of a ‘stark division’ between the pay of men and women, are embarrassing.

The measure used, a crude average, told us nothing about the truth, which is that most employers obey the law enforcing equal pay for equal work, and try as hard as they possibly can to employ and promote women. Clumsy quotas may actually hurt women, as employers try to game the figures by giving low-paid, entry-level jobs to men, while appointing women to senior well-paid posts.

State nagging will not make things better. A serious conservative Premier would listen to the most thoughtful voice on the subject, Kate Andrews of the Institute of Economic Affairs. She has shown that the statistics demanded by Mrs May’s Government conceal far more than they reveal.

They mainly show that, for whatever reason, women have different career patterns from men. In many cases, this is because women choose to do so. As Ms Andrews points out, this could be because women have more sensible ideas than men on the right balance between life and work.

When she explained this on the BBC, her ‘impartial’ interviewer finished the exchange by contradicting her. How can we have a proper debate on anything in this country when everyone has been taught what to think, but almost nobody knows how to think?

*******

Surely Winnie Mandela lost any respect she might have commanded (such as it was) after her endorsement of the practice of ‘necklacing’ those accused of informing by the African National Congress.

This was a mixture of torture and murder, whose victims took 20 unimaginable minutes to die after petrol-soaked tyres were placed over their heads and ignited.

The encounter, between a BBC reporter whose name is unclear (I’m working on this) and Kate Andrews of the Institute of Economic Affairs, is gripping in many ways. I personally wonder what evidence the reporter is referring to at the end of the interview, when she asserts that there is ‘plenty of evidence’ against Ms Andrews’s position, and that many women disagree with her.

The item directly refers to a report produced by Ms Andrews which can be found here (the link to the actual text is at the top right hand corner of the screen, at least it is on my computer):

This coincides with government demands on larger employers to issue figures on comparative pay among male and female employees, which Ms Andrews and I both suspect will be highly misleading. And this is itself a follow up to Ms Andrews’s earlier report on the same subject, published last November, the

The basic message is that claims of a huge pay gap between the sexes are based on a serious misreading. Figures are presented without vital context, such as age breakdown or the type of job.

This lack of context conceals some important facts. Most employers long ago began to pay equal wages for equal work, partly because they were legally obliged to do so, partly because they were morally inclined to do so, and were entirely open to employing women on equal terms to men, in some case because they actively preferred female employees to male, because nowadays they tend to be better-educated and better-fitted for much of the non-manual work which dominates today’s labour market.

It is impossible (so far) to overcome the simple physical fact that many women have babies and no men have babies. Even if women who have babies have male partners, or other close family, who are willing to look after the resulting children, or if they can afford to have them cared for during their working and commuting hours, the actual business of being pregnant and giving birth interrupts the woman’s career. This is a physical and anatomical fact. To accuse employers or employees of ‘discrimination’ for being influenced by this objective fact is to misunderstand the current use of the word. Of course, it is ‘discrimination’ in the way that one might discriminate between a mountain and a valley, or a bus and a train - because they are different. But it is not *unjust* or *irrational* discrimination, It is discrimination between two things which are relevantly, objectively different even to the most unprejudiced people on the planet.

You might respond to this by taking steps to reduce its effects to as near zero as possible – the view of the militant feminists who now dominate public policy. This involves welfare and subsidy measures to allow women to return to paid work as swiftly as possible, and to place pressure on men to become child carers on a much larger scale than now. We shall see if this is workable over the next few decades. I am fascinated by how little (verging on nothing) is done, by comparison, to help women return to paid work after long breaks taken to raise their own children. Feminists don’t seem to regard that particular choice as a valid one.

Or you might accept the motherhood difference as a fact of life, and do what you can to assist women to respond to it as they choose to do so – some in one way, some in another. Kate Andrews, as listeners to the Radio 4 ‘Today’ interview will see, has some interesting and original thoughts about how women may actually have a more sensible idea about how best to live their lives than men do. Equality is not necessarily doing exactly the same thing. Women’s ideas about the work-life balance may be wiser than men’s.

Ms Andrews also cites some interesting cases of employers who, despite not in any way discriminating against female employees, will be made to appear to be doing so by the dumb, context-free way the new figures are being gathered.

Worse still, she shows that the new rules may actually work against the hiring of women, as companies learn how to game the system so that they can *look* as if they are meeting the demands of the equality commissars. This is how rigid, fanatical dogma works. It pleases fanatics, and damages everyone else. Now that we have all forgotten what the USSR was like, it seems we are ready for another bout of this stuff.

25 March 2018 12:54 AM

The homeowners of Britain are being lied to, and unfairly smeared to try to get us to accept a hideous and irreparable destruction of green space in suburbs and the countryside. They are also being blamed personally for a problem they did not cause, in a nasty war on the middle-aged. They should resist this.

It is garbage to claim that liberating grabby developers to build thousands of nasty box homes will bring down the price of housing for the young in any important way.

House prices are madly high, but for quite different reasons. First, there is the mass immigration that nobody can mention without being defamed as a bigot.

Next, there is the destruction of stable family life. The epidemic of divorce created a huge need for more houses, as formerly married parents both sought to offer homes to their children.

Then there’s the concentration of so much employment in London and the South East, and the destruction of jobs elsewhere in the country.

On top of these, there was the foolishly praised decision to sell off council houses. As well as breaking up hundreds of settled and civilised communities, this released billions of pounds into the housing market just as it was exploding anyway.

And, finally, and perhaps most crucial of all, house prices are the only true measure of the inflation of our currency. In a country where money is shrivelling in value daily, cash savings are eaten up by targeted inflation.

Targeted? Yes. The virtual abolition of interest on savings forces those with any money ether to shove it in risky investments, spend it, or put it into the only asset normal people can easily buy – land and property.

Assets are the only guard against the death of money. So people sensibly put as much of their cash as they can into them and so they go up in price.

Ten thousand hideous new ‘executive estates’ blighting villages will not suddenly make houses cheap in areas where people want to live.

Nor will the bulldozing of old-fashioned spacious suburbs to make way for high-density flats. Nor will the concreting of what is left of the Green Belt.

All that will happen will be that the developers will make a lot of money, house prices will stay high and large parts of the country will come to resemble the suburbs of Istanbul, an endless vista of brick, concrete, plastic and exhaust fumes in which people may exist but not live.

I heard last week of a new ploy being used by powerful landowners anxious to cash in on the new boom. This Greed Lobby long ago invented the term ‘Nimby’ (Not In My Back Yard), to abuse those who wished to preserve their neighbourhoods. They lied that such people were selfish and obstinate, refusing to make sacrifices for the common good.

Now they are accusing them – me, if you like – of selfishly sitting on the gains of charmed lives, cruelly depriving the young of homes.

I have heard of immensely rich landowners seeking to build on the Green Belt, openly sneering at their opponents for being middle-aged. Though their motive was plainly to make lots of money out of developing farmland, they sought to make out that those who stood in their way were the selfish ones, keeping young families out of the housing market.

It’s not true. If our children are to inherit anything, we need to stand up against this pressure. If we cannot preserve the savings of years of work in our homes, then where can we preserve them?

I KNOW of people in my parents’ generation who died almost penniless, with no heritage to leave behind, because they had invested their modest savings on the stock market, instead of in housing.

Worse, the rape of the Green Belt and the overdevelopment of the countryside will mean our children inherit a blighted country, almost unrecognisable as the beautiful, civilised place my generation inherited from our forebears. Don’t be bullied into being ashamed of your thrift.

Don’t be abused by oily land- grabbers, whose only real interest is their own wealth, into thinking that by giving into their demands you are helping the young. You won’t be. Let us fight for our backyards, and not be ashamed that we own them.

Turning the spotlight on TV’s sinister new face

Anyone who appears on British TV programmes is now being urged to complete an astonishing questionnaire about skin colour, sexual orientation and ‘gender’.

This is the work of something called the Diamond Creative Diversity Network, which declares: ‘Diamond represents a committed decision by leading UK broadcasters to make change. We cannot expect to change cultures, attitudes or ways of working overnight, but Diamond is the tool that will enable us to say with confidence, “Change gonna come.” ’ Well, I believe this survey is a ridiculous and rather nasty idea. If I go on TV or radio, I do not represent all pinko-grey-skinned heterosexual males in their mid-60s. Many such people disagree with me.

If I represent anyone, I speak for the people who agree with me, whatever age, sex, orientation or skin colour they have. Thursday night’s BBC Question Time, whose audience were all under 30, showed that quite a few people who are neither my age or my skin colour (I neither know nor care about their private lives) were willing to applaud things I said.

But I have little doubt that such surveys will be used to exclude people like me from broadcasting.

This won’t be because I am not diverse enough. It will be because the surveys have provided a cover story for having even fewer moral and social conservatives on the airwaves.

It was certainly one of the tools the Tory Party used in the Cameron years to get rid of anyone who showed any signs of being a conservative.

Back in the 1960s, Martin Luther King quite rightly said that we should be judged on the content of our characters, and on nothing else. In those days, it was Apartheid South Africa which was always listing people according to their exact skin colour, and it was blackmailers who wanted to probe people’s private sexual tastes.

How did we get to this point, where self-congratulating liberals compile these sinister statistics?

****

I HAVE pretty much nothing in common with the pop star will.i.am, interviewed last week in Event magazine. But we share a horror of the drugging of healthy children in the name of ‘ADHD’. I have argued against this ghastly, creepy misuse of medical authority for years. Will.i.am was very nearly a victim of this, saved (as many are) by a tough mother. He says: ‘It’s not the kids who are the problem, it’s the lazy parents and lazy teachers who want kids to take Ritalin… it makes me furious that you get a kid who has this creative energy, who is powering off the walls and people can’t be bothered to deal with the energy. They just want to medicate it away.’ And now they are trying to foist it on adults, too. Why aren’t more people angry?

Sir Ringo strikes all the wrong notes...

Oh, well, now it’s Sir Ringo Starr, joining all the other Tin Pan Alley knights. He’s waited years, and yet it still looks odd and daft to me. These strange honours have made the orders of chivalry look ridiculous to those who once respected them, and made rock stars look ridiculous to those who once mistook them for rebel leaders. Why would any self-respecting rock star want a knighthood?

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14 February 2018 1:55 PM

On Thursday 9th November 2017, the Guardian, a newspaper with a very high opinion of itself, told a serious untruth about me. It said, in print and online, that I had said something I had not said (and do not think).

Amazing

I am pleased to announce that they have now, in the obscurest place they can find, and very grudgingly, admitted that they told an untruth, apologised to me and (sort of) corrected the untruth. At the foot of the offending article you may now find the words (bizarrely preceded by some unrelated stuff about Welsh politics, which ought to be separate, or at least to follow the much more serious admission here) …. 'This article was amended on 10 and 15 November 2017 and 13 February 2018. An earlier version misdescribed Carwyn Jones as the head of the Welsh assembly and suggested that Peter Hitchens’ column included the exact phrase “squawking women”.

We apologise for the error

and you can read Mr Hitchens’ explanation as to why he believes ‘squawking’ is a gender-neutral term here.'

(the emphasis of the words 'we apologise for the error' is mine).

This is what happened. I apologise for all the detail, but writing wrongs is often detailed work. The falsehood appeared in this November 2017 article, by Deborah Orr (I have emphasised the offending passage by putting it into bold type) :

Deborah Orr's original article

Don't blame victims for this toxic debate

Carl Sargeant's death, after misconduct allegations, was tragic. But women must not stop speaking out By: Deborah Orr

‘They really started something, the women who made those first allegations against Harvey Weinstein. It remains to be seen quite how big the thing they started will become. But in Britain, wherever matters are headed, a pause for thought has been created and in the most terrible of ways. On Tuesday, Welsh Labour's Carl Sargeant killed himself. Allegations of sexual misconduct had recently been made against him.

In the wake of those allegations, from three women, Sargeant had been sacked from his cabinet post, and suspended from the Welsh assembly while an investigation took place. Sargeant's situation was made public, although no details of the allegations were given to Sargeant himself. Carwyn Jones, the head of the Welsh assembly, is now under fire because of the way he handled the complaints. Jones has emphasised that he did things "by the book".

Sargeant's grieving family say the Labour party did not give Sargeant the pastoral care that he needed, after he had been placed under so much strain. In the light of events, this criticism seems unanswerable. I don't think it's only the Labour party that needs to learn lessons, though. People need to be able to make allegations of sexual misconduct without fear. Conversely, mere allegations should not be feared so greatly that people's lives are destroyed by them - especially at this time, when the societal rules about permissible behaviour are being painfully redrawn.

It is not appropriate to speculate about this particular case. But more generally, the tenor of debate in the last few weeks has been aggressive. The vast number of allegations against Weinstein encouraged many more women to speak out about their own experiences of sexual attack and harassment. Women in British theatre spoke out. Women in Westminster spoke out. Many women spoke out, and some men.

Crucially, however, there were those who asked what women expected when they agreed to a meeting in a hotel room. The first allegations against Kevin Spacey had barely fallen from his accuser's lips before one columnist fumed that the actor was being punished on the strength of mere gossip. Women who spoke of lunges from politicians were told that they ought to be better at parrying. Women who described hands on knees were told they had probably been assaulted by tablecloths. The threat of a punch on the nose was doughtily touted as the post-feminism woman's version of the slap in the face.

Soon, it was men who were in anguish about their victimhood. Charles Moore, in the Telegraph, worried that women were now on top and fretted about whether they would share power with men or just "crush us". Peter Hitchens, in the Mail On Sunday, vouchsafed that the "squawking women" would end up in niqabs if they carried on the way they were. Brendan O'Neill abandoned his attempts to prime Spacey for martyrdom, and started blathering on about how the witches were doing the witchhunting now. Or something.

Some commentators, David Goodhart chief among them, even started to mansplain that it was only the women of the metropolitan elites who cared about harassment. Out in the boonies, apparently, women are longing for Goodhart to chase them round a desk.

But of course the women of the metropolitan elite would be the ones to complain first, Mr Goodhart, because we are the ones - pretty much by definition - with enough power to say what we don't like and ask (ask!) for it to stop. Anyway, when I was a working-class schoolgirl in Motherwell, guess what? I didn't like being sexually harassed any more than I do now. And I was - a lot.

All women are asking for is for men to treat us as their equals, their friends and their trusted allies. We don't want our bodies to be treated like touchscreen appliances that men swipe at to see what happens next. Equality, friendship and trust foster intimacy, that wonderful connection when two people feel so in tune with each other that physical sharing and sexual unity are the natural and blissfully right conclusion.

Why are so many men so certain that this is not something they can have, that they settle for tweaking a boob on the off-chance instead - or worse, building an empire in which they can wreak vengeance on the women they cannot be intimate with by sexually controlling and humiliating them instead? And why are so many men so keen, so disgustingly keen, to keep things that way?

It doesn't need to be so fraught. Women are willing to draw a line under the past and start again, in a healthier, more respectful culture. But so many powerful people resist the idea that women really don't enjoy capricious, random passes. It's those stubborn people who create an environment in which the fight to establish the bodily autonomy of women gets nasty. In that toxic atmosphere, no one's interests, whether victim or accused, are best served.’

It does not contain the phrase “squawking women” nor any words suggesting that I believe or support this attitude.

I almost immediately sought to correct this untruth by writing a letter to that newspaper, for publication, which I set to them by e-mail at 12.26 p.m. on Friday 10th November.

Here is that letter, which explains the complaint:

‘Deborah Orr (Don't blame victims for this toxic debate, 10 November) says, using quote marks to indicate a direct quotation, that I referred to "squawking women" in my Mail on Sunday column. I did not. No such phrase appears there. This is partly because I would never write such a thing, but mainly because I was in fact attacking the headless mob mentality of the witch-hunting frenzy then taking place. Anyone who actually read the column could see that, though mobs and their facilitators tend not to read very much or very carefully. Ms Orr may perhaps have sexist prejudices which lead her to associate the verb 'to squawk' with the female sex, but I do not. I use it in a gender-neutral, equal-opportunity way. I can prove this. In October I used it to refer to state-sponsored panics over terror, saying “When authority is squawking at you to run away, it is hard to be calm.” In August I used it to characterise the government's approach to leaving the EU as "flapping and squawking". In an article for the US website "First Things" I recently accused diplomats and media of “squawking about a 'New Cold War”. It is a symptom of the unreasoning rage now abroad that those who take part in it pay so little attention to actual facts.

Peter Hitchens’

Normally reasonable

In my experience, the Guardian is normally reasonably quick to publish letters correcting matters of fact. So I was surprised and perplexed when, on the morning of Wednesday 15th November, I noticed that my letter had still not been published. I had begun to wonder if they were going to publish it at all. So I telephoned the Guardian’s letters editor (grandly entitled ‘Readers’ Editor’, or RE for short) to ask what was going on. Late that afternoon, back came an e-mail:

‘Dear Mr Hitchens,

I've spoken to the Letters Desk. I am assured that your letter is still being considered for publication.

Best wishes,

June Sheehan

Assistant Readers' Editor’

A little later, I was told

Dear Mr Hitchens,

I've just spoken to the Letters Desk. I'm told that it is planned to run your letter online this evening and in print tomorrow.

In addition I have amended the Deborah Orr article to remove the suggestion that the exact phrase "squawking women" appeared in your column.

I thought at first sight that this was reasonable. But the following day I found that it was not.

The letter was indeed published.

A note at the end of the online article now said ‘This article was amended on 10 and 15 November 2017. An earlier version misdescribed Carwyn Jones as the head of the Welsh assembly and suggested that Peter Hitchens’ column included the exact phrase “squawking women”’.

Doing it Backwards

I am interested in many ways by this formula. Why does it begin with the misdescription of Carwyn Jones? The minor and non-defamatory error about Mr Jones’s title is of a different nature to (and much less significant than) the article’s untrue suggestion about what I had said. One is just a factual error, hurtful to nobody. The other is a damaging invention about a person the Guardian does not like. Without wishing to be dismissive of Wales and its democratic organs, I suspect that any sentence beginning with a reference to the title of a Welsh politician will immediately lose the attention of most readers, who will not get as far as the much more significant fact which follows – namely that Ms Orr had given a damagingly untrue account of what I had written.

Secondly, the wording saying the article ‘suggested that Peter Hitchens’ column included the exact phrase “squawking women”’, is feeble. It did not ‘suggest’ it. It stated it as a fact. It contains no admission that this was inaccurate and wrong, and implies heavily that, while I had not used the exact phrase, I had intended the meaning.

This repeated the untruth linking the words ‘squawking’ and ‘women’ , but covered itself technically by removing the quote marks round the entire phrase.

I thought this was a puerile and petty response to a serious complaint about a serious inaccuracy, obeying the letter of the rules against untruth, while sneering at its spirit. I still do. So I protested.

I wrote:

‘Dear Readers' Editor,

You have now, after some delay, published the letter below, and (inadequately) altered the inaccurate article concerned. I was told of this last night by e-mail while travelling, acknowledged it, and thanked your colleague, June, for her help. But I do not regard it as a satisfactory outcome or a resolution of the matter, and now wish to make a formal complaint about the way in which you have treated me, in which inaccuracy is mingled with what appears to be a mist of personal hostility (which is perhaps the reason for the inaccuracy).

For your records, here is the letter

(Here I reproduced the letter)

I am glad you have published it, but I am afraid the alteration of the article on the website, so as to include the phrase I never used, but withdraw the quote marks from half it, verges on the puerile. I did not use the phrase. The words 'squawking women' appear nowhere in it, nor any sentence or phrase in which I say that women squawk. Ms Orr's article was indeed technically inaccurate, in quoting me as having used the phrase. More importantly, it was simply untrue. You have corrected the technicality, and left the falsehood untouched.

More importantly, the activity of 'squawking' is nowhere in the article attributed to women. Nowhere. So to withdraw the quote marks from the word 'women' but still place the two words side by side, and attribute them to me, is a plain falsehood, made considerably worse by the fact that it is uttered *after* I have pointed this out to you, and so can't possibly be attributed to mere carelessness.

I show in my letter that it is a verb I like to use, in mockery of folly, and apply in a wholly gender-fluid way. I would not use such a phrase as ‘squawking women’, and did not do so, though no doubt Ms Orr (whom I have never knowingly met) likes to think that I would. The description of its contents is also, in my opinion, a crude misrepresentation of the thoughts I express. I would normally overlook that, but since you have decided to treat my letter with what looks to me like cynical levity, I think I must now mention it, not least because it was one of two hostile misrepresentations of me in one week, in your newspaper.

I'll return to it in a moment. But first I must deal with your alteration of the online version of Ms Orr's article. It formerly read ‘Peter Hitchens, in the Mail On Sunday, in a spectacular reversal of reality, vouchsafed that the “squawking women" would end up in niqabs if they carried on the way they were.’ It doesn't say that. It says this: 'Well, isn’t this what you want, all you squawking flapping denouncers of groping men and ‘inappropriate’ jokes?

You have lots in common with Militant Islamists on this subject. They, too, believe that all men must be assumed to be slavering predators.

And these beliefs lie behind the severe dress codes and sexual segregation which modern liberals claim to find so shocking about Islam.’

It points out that the leaders of this witch-hunt (no sex specified) are adopting attitudes remarkably similar to those which lie behind militant Islam's dress codes, which such people affect to oppose and despise. It says nothing about 'ending up'. Ms Orr has made that up, presumably because, like you, she doesn't like the similarity between her position and that of the Ayatollahs and Mullahs being pointed out and responds by misrepresenting what I said. OK, if you like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing you like. Low-grade, but effective as far as it goes. I mention it not because I expect you to be ashamed of it, though you should be, but because it is circumstantial evidence for my abiding point, which is that the use of the phrase ‘ “squawking” women’ is just as false and inaccurate (when compared with the objective truth) as the use of the phrase ‘ “squawking women”’.

The connection of the word ‘squawking’ to the word ‘women’ does not occur in my article, and you have committed an inaccuracy by stating that it does. By persisting in the inaccuracy, and grudgingly shifting the quote marks, you have in my view made this worse. Despite the absence of objective evidence for your claim, and my own evidence that I often use the verb 'squawk' without any such connotations (there's a lot more of that, by the way).

I must here remind you of the kind of stuff you saw fit to publish about me a few days before.

Ms Williams says 'This in turn aerated the paranoid fantasies of Peter Hitchens, who concluded in his column in the Mail on Sunday : “Wise men in Westminster will in future go about with chaperones, record and film all conversations with the opposite sex … nothing else will keep them safe from claims that they momentarily applied a ‘fleeting hand’ to someone’s knee.” So, our claims are petty; men are more likely to suffer than women; we’ll end up in niqabs if we’re not careful, and what’s more, we’ll deserve it.'

Well, that's not what I said, but if you don't want to pay attention to what somebody says the easiest way of keeping it out of your mind is to distort it. If that is the sort of journalism you wish to do, it's a free country. I've also no doubt Ms Williams is qualified in Psychiatry and can make remote diagnoses of anyone she cares to analyse, which must be a handy sideline. But fantasies? By their nature, accusations of this sort cannot usually be proven. But the prevailing mood is inclined to believe the accuser. How, then is any male person going to establish his innocence of the charge, when guilt is, in practice, presumed? I had thought that the Guardian would be one of those papers which believed absolutely in the presumption of innocence and due process, but I do increasingly begin to wonder (see the George Bell issue) The methods I suggest are only a small step further on from the Antioch College code, which was actually designed by modern feminists. See https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-antioch-college-got-rape-right-20-years-ago

I wouldn't have bothered with Zoe Williams's attack if you had responded in a grown-up fashion to my letter. But two ignorant distortions in one week, plus a factual error, plus a refusal to correct a severe misrepresentation, begin to look like carelessness. Are you saying that you can do this sort of thing with impunity? That you have no conscience? Or that you just don't care what you say about me, and so nor should I? Or do you have any proposals as to how to set the record straight? I know from hard experience that you are Judge and Jury in your own Cause in these matters, but I still hope that there is some trace of natural justice somewhere in your organisation, and that we will now find it.

This is a formal complaint. I would like you to investigate it at the earliest opportunity.

I look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Peter Hitchens

Answer came there none

To begin with, I had no response at all from the ‘Readers’ Editor’.

So I wrote on 17th November:

Dear Guardian Readers' Editor,

I sent the message below at 3.47 p.m. yesterday (16th November 2017) but have received no response or acknowledgement. Could you please acknowledge receipt?

Many thanks,

Peter Hitchens’

I then had this reply:

‘Dear Mr Hitchens,

I have read your email dated 16 November 2017.

I am advised that two staff who work in my office conferred and decided to amend the quotation marks in the Guardian column (and to explain the change to readers in a footnote) in an attempt to address your point that you had not written the two words "squawking women" together in that order.

Your letter on the matter was published in its entirety by the Guardian on 16 November, online and in the newspaper.

In all the circumstances, I believe it would be disproportionate for this office to do more on this matter.

You continue to have access to a significant public platform, the Mail stable, if you wish to air further thoughts beyond your blogpost of 16 November.

In response to that blogpost, one of your readers (Tom, at 9:04 on 17 November) wrote: "If so many people got the wrong impression then maybe you didn't express your point of view very well."

Perhaps this matter stems from a writer's intended meaning not being adequately reflected in a headline written by a sub-editor. That would be a matter for you and your Mail stable colleagues to consider.

I believe that a reasonable reader, unaware of the frequency and variety of your use of squawking, taking in the headline and reading your article of 5 November, could receive the impression that the word squawking referred to women.

Especially as a columnist, you are entitled to your opinions and interpretations of the views of others. Your readers, other columnists, and their readers, are entitled to theirs.

Yours sincerely,

Paul Chadwick

Readers' editor’

It doesn't matter what you said. It is what we think you said that matters

In other words, it didn’t matter what I had actually said. If someone else *thought* I had said what I hadn’t said, it was all right for the Guardian to say that I had said it. And he wasn’t going to do anything else. Around the same time, I attempted a Twitter exchange with Ms Orr herself on the subject, but she swore at me and then, when I had called her an ‘intellectual’ a couple of times in response, blocked me.

Liberals, when challenged, are in my experience the most obdurate and personally unpleasant opponents you can find. Even actual Bolsheviks have more of a sense of humour about their faults.

I then wrote:

‘Dear Mr Chadwick,

I will not argue beyond pointing out that your website is currently publishing a demonstrable falsehood which you know to be a falsehood. The fact that I can write elsewhere is irrelevant and the excuse that if someone else thought so too, it’s all right for you to lie about what I said, is just silly. It’s not about me. It’s about you publishing an untruth. If you refuse to handle the matter then I must act as if you have rejected the complaint and go to the next stage. Please remind me what that is. Soon, if you would.

PH’

On 20 Nov 2017, at 5:40 pm, Readers' Editor (Guardian) wrote:

Dear Mr Hitchens,

We refer to your email to Paul Chadwick, readers' editor, dated 20 November 2017, seeking information about how to appeal to the Review Panel about the matter set out in the emails below.

Here are the details:

Please find attached the complaints form. This explains that you’ll need to outline in no more than 500 words which of the 16 clauses of the former PCC code of practice you believe the Guardian has broken and why. Once you have completed the form, please send it to the Complaints Officer who works on behalf of the review panel

Once your complaint has been received, the complaints officer will assess whether there is a prima facie breach of the Editors' Code before the panel decides whether there is a case to answer.

The Complaints Officer may contact you for further information in relation to your complaint and to update you as to the progress of your complaint.

Please be aware that the outcome of the review panel's deliberations will be published on the Guardian's website.

​Guardian Readers' editor's office

Guardian News & Media

I then sent the required complaint:

The Formal Complaint Goes in

Please state briefly why you remain unhappy with the outcome of the RE procedure

The RE response was dismissive and based not on the objective falsehood of the story but on the fact that some people might think it correct, even though it was objectively, undeniably false. I did not write the words ‘squawking women’. The Mail on Sunday did not publish any such words. Your writer wrote that I did, and you (without checking) published her inaccuracy. Challenged, you continued to behave as if I had in fact used them, not because I had, but because you prefer to think that is what I meant. Inaccuracy is an objective fact, not a matter of opinion. The original Guardian print article was unquestionably inaccurate (but possibly merely sloppy and unprofessional) because it said I had used a combination of words I did not use. The amended article was an active, deliberate falsehood because, *after* I had pointed out the inaccuracy, it continued to claim falsely that I had used a combination of words I did not use and so express a thought I did not express. Thus the ‘correction’ worsened the offence. The note on the website, in which you say the original article ‘suggested that Peter Hitchens’ column included the exact phrase “squawking women”, merely manages to suggest that I had used a phrase broadly resembling this, when I did not. The publication of my letter does not mitigate this behaviour. In a way it worsens it because it publicly implies that you do not believe me. The fact that I am able to correct these matters elsewhere (referred to in your response) does not free you of your duties to be accurate and truthful in your own columns and on your own website.

Please state briefly what outcome you say ought to follow your complaint

A proper correction in your corrections column and on the website, (PCC Code Clause 1) Section ii) i A significant inaccuracy, misleading statement or distortion must be corrected, promptly and with due prominence, and — where appropriate — an apology published) in which it is made clear that I did not use the words ‘squawking women’ or write any words which could be represented truthfully as ‘“squawking” women’. The false claim should also be removed from the web article. An apology from the author and the newspaper would be nice, because it is unpleasant to be lied about, but I can see that might stick in your throat. I’ll leave it to you to decide what sort of people you are, particularly whether you are the sort that think telling lies in print about others is worthy of an apology.

Please set out briefly in no more than 500 words:

1. The words complained about and

2. Why you consider the words to be in breach of the former PCC Code.

Please ensure you set out clearly what clause of the code you consider to have been breached. Your complaint will not be accepted unless you state clearly the words complained of and specify which clause(s) your complaint falls under.

The words complained of in the online version are: ‘Peter Hitchens, in the Mail On Sunday, in a spectacular reversal of reality, vouchsafed that the ‘“squawking” women would end up in niqabs if they carried on the way they were.’ This is not true. It is inaccurate, misleading and distorted. There is no doubt about this (PCC Code Clause 1, section i)) ‘The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information’). At no point do I refer to women as ‘squawking’. The verb applies to ‘all you squawking flapping denouncers of groping men and “inappropriate” jokes’. Many of those denouncing this behaviour with exaggerated fervour are men. As Ms Orr states in her article (direct verifiable quotation) ‘Many women spoke out, and some men’. As I explained in my letter (and can bolster, if you wish, with several other examples) I frequently use the verb ‘squawk’ in an entirely gender-neutral way.

Ms Orr’s article is simply, clearly false and inaccurate. (Code Section 1, clause i)) It was false when you wrongly directly quoted me as using the words “squawking women”, words missing from the article. It is just as wrong, and more deliberately untrue, when you falsely suggest that I expressed the sentiment ‘“squawking” women’ in the web version. I demonstrably did not. This conjunction of verb and adjective are entirely missing from my article. You cannot produce any quotation which justifies the claim, and you know it. Which of us, by the way, I in my article of the 5th November or Ms Orr in her inaccurate attack on me and on that article on the 10th November, wrote these two passages: 1. ‘The wonderful new equality between men and women, which is one of the great changes for the better in our age’ and 2. ‘Equality, friendship and trust foster intimacy, that wonderful connection’?

Some attempt has been made to claim that the headline justifies the untruth. It ran ‘What will women gain from all this squawking about sex pests? A niqab.’ This attempt does not work. Headlines necessarily simplify, and I had and have no complaint about this one. No stretch of grammar could connect the word ‘squawking’, with the word ‘women’. Had the heading run ‘What will women gain from all *their* squawking?’, then it would. But (say) ‘What will children gain from all this squawking about marriage?’ does *not* attribute the squawking to the children. Nor does this formulation link it with women. The only thing that links the two in the mind of any reader is that reader’s own prejudiced view that ‘squawking’ can refer only to, or only be done by, women. This misrepresentation, in my view, also brings the article under PCC Clause 1) section iv) : ‘The Press, while free to editorialise and campaign, must distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact’. I can prove that I have no such prejudice, from much published work. It seems Ms Orr cannot, and nor can you. You have my sympathy in your struggle. But don’t try to inflict your prejudices on me.

The publication is clearly in breach of the PCC Code Clause 1, sections i) ii) and iii) ‘

The liberal Grandees Hand Down Their Verdict.

Now we have this decision from the ultra-grand panel which poses as the ultimate custodian of truth and propriety at Britain’s most self-regarding newspaper.

It refers to ‘Hitchens 2’ because I have previously tangled with the same body, not in my own cause, but over the Guardian’s now clearly mistaken decision (unregretted by them, so far) to treat allegations against the late Bishop Bell as proven fact, in October 2015. See https://www.theguardian.com/info/2016/feb/11/the-review-panel-hitchens-decision . They were obdurate. I have since written to the then chairwoman (now retired) of this panel, pointing out the Carlile Report’s vindication of my arguments. She has not replied.

The Guardian admits it was wrong!

It contains (as it must) an unequivocal admission that my complaint is well-founded and that the Guardian published a false thing about me. This is in paragraph 10: The emphases are mine ‘It is clear from the complainant’s original article that he did not use the phrase “squawking women”. In this regard we note GNM’s Editorial Code regarding the use of direct quotation marks and in particular that direct quotations “should not be changed to alter their context or meaning.” The Panel considers therefore that the original version of the Article which attributed to Mr Hitchens the direct quote “squawking women” was inaccurate and misleading in breach of Clause 1(i) of the Code. It is moreover the Panel’s view that the inaccuracy was a significant one because of the use of quotation marks, which gave the clear impression that Mr Hitchens had used that precise phrase in the article he wrote for the Mail on Sunday”

Well, you might cheer at that. You’d think it would lead to a proper and prominent correction, in the newspaper, and amendment to the offending article by Ms Orr, and soothing remarks all round.

But not all that wrong

But no, the teenage decision to maintain the fiction that I had referred to ‘squawking women’, by continuing to place the two words together as I did not do, while removing the actual quote marks from one of the words, is defended by the Panel, who say that ‘an ordinary reasonable reader would consider this [‘squawking’] a gendered word and one which is typically used to refer to women’.

They completely ignore the many recent examples I provide of my own use of the word in a ‘non-gendered’ way. They also ignore the clear sentiments of my article, which actually commends equality of the sexes.

Similarly, they assert (despite my unanswerable -and unanswered logical and grammatical arguments to the contrary, which they make no attempt to address) that the headline connects “squawking” to women. It simply does not.

Here’s more evidence on my gender-neutral use of this word over several years :

I am not sure how they are entitled to do this, but they do. But I know *why* they are entitled to act in this fashion. There is no appeal. They fear no other judge.

They take the view that ‘the intention of the author has little bearing on the interpretation given to a piece by its readers, provided the interpretation is a reasonable one’. In other words, we can decide what someone means, even if the words he uses don’t in any way support it, and the meaning is all in their own prejudiced minds. I wonder how they would respond if I applied the same rule to them.

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13 December 2017 12:05 PM

I have slightly tidied and edited this exchange with Michael Wood in the ‘Comments; section of my Sunday posting, because I think it deals with some rather important arguments about education in modern Britain.

It opens with Mr Wood’s second major posting on the subject (the nature of his earlier posting is, I think, clear from the exchange, but it is easily studied on the thread.)

Mr Wood wrote: ‘Mr Hitchens is flummoxed - he asks, ***Where, and in what words, do I 'appear to defend' 'posh' children's educational privileges derived from public schools and 'good state schools' in 'expensive' catchment areas - both of which are out of the reach of the average wage earner? *** - but then, in the same breath, he confirms what is now an unequivocal defence of it, here; ***….. I defend those parents who beggar themselves (as many do) to buy good education for their children where the state does not provide it, though it is undoubtedly a regrettable use of privilege…***! “Beggar themselves”, he claims! Nary has a one of them, I doubt, ever actually ‘beggared themselves’! Foregone a Range Rover for a Jag, maybe, or put on hold their climb up the property ladder and even possibly needed to shed a domestic maid or gardener.’

PH : ‘He may doubt what he likes. But he does not know. I do. He would be amazed, if he met the parents of independent school children, how many of them have modest incomes and make considerable sacrifices to meet the fees. I defend this as an act of responsible parenting when the state actively denies their children a good education through dogmatic policy. They are not so much buying privilege as pay to avoid damage. By doing so they take nothing away from those who cannot do as they do. ‘

Mr Wood: Besides, my simple question, repeat ‘question’, to him was to do with his apparent unmitigated condemnation of politician’s privileges of office *compared* to his mitigating comments (as, again, above) when it comes to the educational privileges of the well-to-do. He then defends the poor beggars with; ***…what else are they supposed to do, if they can afford it?***

***PH notes. Perhaps Mr Wood is childless, and does not grasp the nature of the compulsion. Precisely, it is this: For those who value education above fashionable clothes, restaurant meals, foreign holidays, cars, houses or electronic gadgets, there is no choice, especially if they live in the many parts of the country where even the ‘best’ state schools are in fact undisciplined hell-holes of bullying and enforced ignorance. They must spend the money instead on schooling, and they do. Or did. Increasingly the choice is denied to them by the ever-rising fees which are charged, hence the readiness to believe in the claims of ‘academies’ which in reality offer little real improvement on the bog-standard comp, but are much better at presentation and public relations. MPs, by contrast, can choose whether they accept and use their privileges, which are mere luxuries, quite incomparable to the future of children. Some do not, and are the better for it,***

Mr Wood: Indeed, in our capitalist world of dog eat dog, which I often condemn,( or squawk about, as R King so ungraciously posted), that is exactly what people do and their ‘membership’ of society is conveniently placed on hold. People in power – like politicians - obscenely award themselves privileges. People who are financially well off, (usually due to a privileged education), continue to buy those privileges for their own children. The rest of the people have no choice - and so it continues. The question is: – in a better world, in which we all would like to live, would it be the right-minded way to be? Mr Hitchens states his desire to see the re-establishment of state grammar schools – something I totally agree with - but that only addresses a very small part of ‘the scourge of privilege’ by favouring the more talented, not so well off, few. It fails to address the unacceptable (imo) problem for the remaining majority who are not without talents but are doomed to not receive the necessary education to be able to exercise their ‘rights of affordability’.

PH : Why does he say this? The re-establishment of state grammar schools, would raise all standards - especially if accompanied, as originally planned, with technical high schools.

Mr Wood: A very communistic-type viewpoint on my part, I know, but I haven’t abandoned my desire for ‘privilege for all - not just the few’, and I am not afraid or ashamed to say so. So I, for one, don’t think I have misunderstood, Mr Hitchens, given his own Marxist-type history which I believe is the underlining cause of his being flummoxed.

PH : I note that he avoids entirely the main point I was making - he refuses to acknowledge the difference between private education, bought openly as such by people (often far from rich) who value education so highly that they pay for it rather than see their children ill-educated; and the purchase of better education, secretly, by left-wing persons (by definition rich as they do this by purchasing expensive houses in exclusive areas) who claim to be against privilege but actually buy if for themselves. And, by doing so, they deny it to others less well-off than they are (in contrast to those who openly pay fees, see above) .

And then (perhaps most damaging and selfish of all) they claim that, because their children go to 'good' comprehensive schools and benefit from the anti-private school quotas now increasingly in operation, that the comprehensive system is fine and needs no change, except more quotas.

Mr Wood: However, I have obviously offended him….

PH: Tripe. I have seldom in life been less offended. I really cannot see why he wishes to avoid an argument about facts and logic by pretending that I am 'offended' (well, I can, it is because he can see himself losing it if he doesn't pull the ripcord now) . 'The word 'flummoxed' does not betoken offence. It is a polite way of saying that someone apparently intelligent and knowledgeable has said something which is both stupid and ignorant. But sometimes politeness fails, it seems.

Mr Wood:….which was never my intention – and so, for that; Mr Hitchens, I humbly apologise.

PH: I did not seek, and do not want, an apology.

Mr Wood then submitted a further long response:

Mr Wood first quotes me ‘PH writes: he may doubt what he likes. But he does not know. I do. (Referring to ***those parents who beggar themselves as many do)’

PH: Mr Wood, ah, suggests that I am mistaken, writing ‘I find that beggars belief, too. And changing his own description from - ***, though it is undoubtedly a regrettable use of privilege…*** to - *** They are not so much buying privilege as pay to avoid damage.*** is an attempt to divert attention from my original question and create an argument instead.’

***PH inserts here. No, it is not. I had (foolishly) not realised that my point would be attacked and misrepresented by such a tricky person. I shall not repeat this error. Had I done so, I would have armoured it in advance against such deliberate misunderstanding. Instead, I have retroactively done so. There is no guilt in creating an argument, but this is one that Mr Wood has made. It has nothing to do with the point of my article. ***

Mr Wood then quotes me as wondering ‘Perhaps Mr Wood is childless, and does not grasp the nature of the compulsion.*** In response to this speculation; I have many children and many more grandchildren. (PH inserts: Many! Is a slightly more precise count not desirable? He sounds like a Biblical patriarch).Some of both groups have attended private school and some teach in private schools and, for myself and my own children who attended them, it was for location rather than ideological reasons only - in countries where they were not eligible to attend local schools,

PH (intervenes to ask) ***Does this mean that the private schools involved are all abroad? This really has very little to do with the subject under discussion, in that case. One might also ask whether, in these cases, he had any assistance in meeting the fees, as is common for parents whose work takes them abroad. As for not being ‘eligible’ to attend local schools, I find this expression most interesting. I have yet to encounter a country which refused foreign children access to its schools. Who decided on eligibility in these cases?

Mr Wood continues: and, I do “grasp the nature of compulsion”

PH asks : Does he, indeed? I am unconvinced. In his contribution above he gives the two reasons for using private schools as ‘location’ (by which he seems to mean being stuck in a country where he wouldn’t dream of sending any of his ‘many’ children to the local schools, and so perforce uses international schools) and ‘ideological’. This second seems to dismiss the concerns of private school parents as political rather than educational. It suggests to me that he In my experience (once again) many parents who believed the propaganda that state schools were improving have moved their children to independent schools because they were appalled at the standards they then discovered in supposedly ‘good’ state schools. Indeed this happened to some formerly childless state school teachers known to me who entirely changed their minds when they had children and began to experience the schools they taught in as consumers rather than producers.

Mr Wood… it is under my control – as I already informed him here; “but I haven’t abandoned my desire (to banish privilege by providing privilege) for all - not just the few’” In other words; I believe (as he believes about the existence of grammar schools) that if the elite schools of today did not exist the elites would ensure that all schools – not just a few more- were suitable for the education of their own children.

PH: But that is not what I believe at all. I believe that if private schools were abolished entirely (something only a totalitarian state could do) , there would be secret elite schools available only to the children of the powerful , such as the Lenin High School in Havana, the Carl von Ossietzky Erweiterte Oberschule in (East) Berlin, the Mangyongdae High School in Pyongyang and the former School Number One in Moscow (whose Soviet-era selection methods are personally known to me, through the account of a former pupil who was once a colleague of mine).

Mr Wood continues, quoting me : He (PH) asks;*** Why does he say this? The re-establishment of state grammar schools would raise all standards - especially if accompanied, as originally planned, with technical high schools.*** - How can he know this? I know how bad the majority of our state schools are. Does he know? I know that the teaching methods are, on their own, failing the majority of their pupils. Does he know this? I know that there are grammar schools in existence that have little or no effect on the teaching methods or quality of the majority of their neighbouring failing schools. Does he know this?

****PH writes: is Mr Wood a new arrival here? (in which case why is he so bold about commenting, before he has troubled to know my mind?) Can he really not have read the many articles here (helpfully indexed and archived under the giveaway phrase ‘Grammar Schools’) in which I explain that a *national* system of selection by ability bears no resemblance to the tiny rump of surviving grammar schools concentrated in well-off commuter-belt areas? I suggest he reads them. I really cannot be bothered to rehearse the arguments or repeat the facts stated in them. I know it would work better than what we have because, when it did exist, it worked better than what we have, and when it was abolished, our standards demonstrably fell.

Mr Wood: I also know that the only sure way the output of our state schools can ever improve *now* is when the output of those privileged schools, which determine their fate, is stemmed and a new, less selfish breed of politician is elected from other sources instead. Does he believe this? His privileged schooling will most probably prevent him from even contemplating this.

****PH notes: the ‘breed’ he seeks were in power from 1964 onwards. They created the mess we now have. So I do not know how he can maintain that policies which have been demonstrably followed by a precipitous fall in standards oif all kind can possibly be offered now as a key to future improvement. My schooling was privileged until I left school at 15, and continued my education in the state system (at a College of Further Education, many of whose students had come there form the state system). Many of my coevals at the University of York were the last generation of grammar school graduates, and came from an astonishing breadth of backgrounds. I was also an active member of a Bolshevik faction which made genuine efforts to recruit among manual workers. I spent a large part of my time at the CFE and university in the close company of dustmen, bus conductors (they still existed), and factory workers. It would be mistaken to imagine that I am some out-of-touch toff, not least because I am myself the grandson of a pioneer member of the National Union of Teachers and lifelong state school teacher, and the great grandson of one of the men who helped built the 19th century naval dockyard at Portsmouth (with his hands) . My grandfather (the NUT pioneer) was the disciple and admirer of the great John Pounds, a Portsmouth local hero, who set up that city’s first free school for poor children.

Mr Wood then notes that I accused him of evasion PH***I note that he avoids entirely the main point I was making –

PH :But he then avoids mentioning what point it was that I was referring to. Here it is : ‘I note that he avoids entirely the main point I was making - he refuses to acknowledge the difference between private education, bought openly as such by people (often far from rich) who value education so highly that they pay for it rather than see their children ill-educated; and the purchase of better education, secretly, by left-wing persons (by definition rich as they do this by purchasing expensive houses in exclusive areas) who claim to be against privilege but actually buy if for themselves. And, by doing so, they deny it to others less well-off than they are (in contrast to thosewho openly pay fees, see above) .

And then (perhaps most damaging and selfish of all) they claim that, because their children go to 'good' comprehensive schools and benefit from the anti-private school quotas now increasingly in operation, that the comprehensive system is fine and needs no change, except more quotas.’

By leaving out this quotation, or any summary of it, Mr Wood conceals the otherwise rather obvious fact that he has not at any stage responded to the point contained in it. He still hasn’t, as far as I can see, and if he thinks he has, perhaps he could produce quotations.

Mr Wood …**** No I do not! I was addressing nothing other than the comparison of his condemnation of politician’s privilege and his undeniable defence of educational privilege for the well to do and he knows it and chooses to ignore it! It is he that is trying to muddy the waters with another angle of argument to avoid addressing my only point.

Mr Wood then quotes me again, in my dismissal of his belief that he has ‘offended’ me. ***PH: Tripe. I have seldom in life been less offended. I really cannot see why he wishes to avoid an argument about facts and logic by pretending that I am 'offended' (well, I can, it is because he can see himself losing it if he doesn't pull the ripcord now)… .

Mr Wood writes: *** I refer to my previous paragraph and what is there here to lose other than a sense of proportion and direction – and it’s not I who has ascended into the clouds and harping on.’

PH remarks. I do not know what this is supposed to convey.

Mr Wood in a later post sceptically quotes me when I say (of the sacrifices made by many parents of children at private schools) : ‘But he does not know. I do. He would be amazed, if he met the parents of independent school children, how many of them have modest incomes and make considerable sacrifices to meet the fees.’

Mr Wood asks: Maybe Mr Hitchens could enlighten us as to *how* he knows the difference between fee-paying parents who are of ‘modest incomes’ and fee granted parents who are not well off at all. (Could he be confusing the two?)?’

***PH writes: personal knowledge. I’m not sure what he means by ‘fee-granted parents’, as if there were some great number of parents getting fee education at private schools. Some (not all) private schools do offer a very limited number of bursaries, but these seldom meet the full fees and still leave their beneficiaries with a lot of money to find.

I have been paying fees myself to a variety of private schools for a quarter of a century, am acquainted with other parents at such schools and with teachers at them, and also, as a national newspaper columnist, I receive correspondence on this subject. I don't care if he chooses to disbelieve me because the truth doesn't suit his extraordinarily complacent view. This is knowledge, and I have not the slightest doubt that it is true****

Mr Wood: It would be highly unlikely that any private school would run a ‘who’s who’ to identify them, neither, I suspect would the parents involved be broadcasting their incomes to little Johnnie and his buddies or their fellow parents.

***PH writes: I am not sure what the widow’s mite has to do with this, the parable being (as far as I can recall) a lesson in how God values charity not by quantity but by the sacrifice made by the giver. The left-wing plutocrat who keeps his child out of a good private school whose fees he could easily afford, and sends that child instead to a less-good state school (though one better than the run of state schools) because he 'opposes private education' is sacrificing his child for his ideology. Worse, he is sacrificing other people's children - namely, the children from poor homes displaced from scarce places in his chosen state school and forced into inferior ones to make way for his child; and the multitudes who suffer because this person uses this policy to help uphold and sustain the comprehensive state school system, which pointlessly ruins thousands of lives a year.

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03 December 2017 1:24 AM

Our education system teaches the young what to think, not how to think. And if you ever wonder why so many things don’t work properly any more, or why you can’t get any sense out of so many organisations, this is one of the main reasons.

But it’s also getting harder and harder to think or say certain things. This week I experienced this mixture of brainwashing and propaganda at two different ends of the system.

I was sent a rather sinister questionnaire given to new arrivals at a secondary school I won’t name.

And I was the target of a bizarre and rather sad counter-demonstration at one of Oxford’s most exalted colleges. They are, in a way, connected.

The questionnaire is part of what has now become PSHCE, Personal, Social, Health and Citizenship Education. It is not anonymous, but it seeks, in a slippery sideways manner, to discover what the children involved think about immigration.

The cleverest question asks 11-year-olds to say why they think there is a shortage of jobs for younger people. One answer on the multiple-choice form is ‘competition from international applicants’.

They are asked to agree or disagree with such statements as ‘I like to be around people from other countries’ and ‘meeting students from other countries is interesting’. They are also invited to say how much they agree or disagree with the statement ‘immigration is bad for the country’.

They are asked if they have close friends from different countries, and how they would speak to a person whose first language isn’t English. And they are asked if immigrants should have the same rights as everyone else, whether they should be encouraged to speak the language of this country or encouraged to continue in their own traditions.

Well, I agree very strongly with the parent who sent this to me because she thought it was sinister probing into the minds of children, and also into her own opinions, none of the business of the school or the State.

Might some little symbol be placed against the name of any pupil who answered in the wrong way? Might it affect that pupil’s future and the attitude of the school towards the parents? If not, what is the educational purpose of this?

There’s no doubt a terrible conformism has infected our system. When I went to speak at Balliol College in Oxford about the restoration of grammar schools, I was met by a smallish, silent crowd holding up placards objecting to my presence there.

Judging from the righteous looks on their faces, they knew they were right. When I asked them to explain their point of view, they said nothing (unless you count one small raspberry). But I was handed two sheets of paper in which I was thoroughly denounced and hugely misrepresented as ‘Transphobic’ and ‘homophobic’.

I was, this indictment said, ‘a figure of hostility and hatred’. It ended in a sort of farce. A young woman positioned herself in front of me, walking slowly backwards while holding up a home-made placard proclaiming ‘History will forget you’. It hasn’t even remembered me yet.

Alas, she was walking backwards towards a large and prickly bush. She was so set on scorning me that she paid no heed when I warned her of her peril, and she duly reversed into it. No shrubs were hurt in the making of this protest, but it put her off her stride.

Still, history repeats itself. And if on this occasion the first time was farce, the next time could be tragedy. Such people will very soon be fanning out into politics, the law and the media. How long before they have the power to silence and punish me and you? Not as long as you think.

*****

Smashing film, shame about the facts

Battle Of The Sexes, the new film about the great tennis player Billie Jean King, is a terrific watch – funny, dramatic, clever and morally satisfying. You come out of the cinema surprised by how long you’ve been there, which doesn’t happen often.

But the more I looked into the actual events portrayed, the more I felt I’d been used and bamboozled. I have to be careful here or the Guardian newspaper will make up more lies about me. So let me say that I admire Billie Jean King as a sportswoman and as a tough campaigner for women’s freedom. I am also pleased she has found happiness in her life with a female partner.

I loathed the condescension and the legal restrictions still inflicted on women in the 1970s, and was personally and politically glad to see them swept away. And if that was all the film celebrated, I’d be content. But it wasn’t that simple. Billie Jean’s husband is rightly shown as a thoughtful and generous man. Yet the girlfriend who introduced Billie Jean to same-sex love is more than slightly idealised.

And another great tennis player of the age, Margaret Court, is portrayed as a sour and crabbed person. Could this be because she disapproved of the sexual revolution and has now become a minister in a very conservative church? I think it may be so.

Also, very little is made of the awkward, unavoidable fact that women’s tennis prospered because it was sponsored by cigarette brand Virginia Slims. Was the cause so good that this sordid bargain was justified?

Slim cigarettes, as far as I know, still kill those who smoke them, and this was no secret in the 1970s. But perhaps most startling of all is the great match which is the climax of the film, when Billie Jean defeats the male-chauvinist braggart Bobby Riggs, so exploding his boasts of superiority.

But you’d never know from the movie that US media have explored, and not disproved, serious claims that Riggs, a habitual gambler with Mafia contacts, deliberately lost the game to pay off a large debt to the Godfather and his boys.

He’d easily beaten Margaret Court. So maybe it wasn’t as conclusive as all that. Why leave this out? Films about factual events, it seems to me, have a duty to stick as close to the truth as possible. Dramatic licence is fine, but not when it puts the audience in the dark about what really happened.

*****

Sailors should stick to their ships

Her Majesty’s bluejackets are not meant to look smart. They are meant to take, burn, sink and destroy the enemy, and scare them the rest of the time.

They can sometimes be compelled into a semblance of spit and polish, but they just look silly and slightly sinister guarding Buckingham Palace.

Armed sailors on the street make me think of Petrograd in 1917 and Berlin in 1918, a sign that mutiny was in the air and order was breaking down.

And why aren’t they in their ships? In this case it is for an almost equally alarming reason – we hardly have any ships any more, at least ships that can be made to move and fight, and aren’t broken down or for sale.

As the number of spare seamen grows, what other unsuitable jobs will the Defence Ministry find for them? Tending the flowers at Kew Gardens?

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05 November 2017 2:17 AM

Behold my proposed new autumn look for women in politics. The black, I think, is flattering and it radiates an air of cool unapproachability. No Minister would put his hand on the knee of anyone dressed like this; indeed, he’d have trouble finding her knee, or anything else

Well, isn’t this what you want, all you squawking flapping denouncers of groping men and ‘inappropriate’ jokes?

You have lots in common with Militant Islamists on this subject. They, too, believe that all men must be assumed to be slavering predators.

And these beliefs lie behind the severe dress codes and sexual segregation which modern liberals claim to find so shocking about Islam.

Yet on this, it turns out that you agree with them. Any male action, any form of words you choose to disapprove of can and will be presumed to be guilty because, well, men are like that. The culprit will be ruined for ever.

Are you all off your heads? Do you have no sense of proportion?

The country is in the midst of its biggest constitutional crisis for a century, and wobbling on the precipice of bankruptcy.

The welfare system is about to melt down. And you think the most important thing in your lives is a hunt for long-ago cases of wandering hands, or tellers of coarse jokes? Yes, you do.

You have lost all touch with reality, and future generations will laugh at you. Alas, you are in charge now.

Take this, for example: Michael Fallon was one of the worst Defence Secretaries in history.

The Army is a skeleton, the Navy dead in the water, largely motionless and stripped of its most basic capacities.

The former head of the Navy, Lord West, is reduced to writing to the newspapers to try to point out the dangers, because nobody will listen.

But was Mr Fallon made to quit over that? No. Neither the political class nor their pals in the media class care about such things. He was driven from office because he is alleged not to be safe in mixed company.

In a way, this is very old-fashioned. Personally, I am a Victorian prude, though I try to keep it under control. I am still secretly shocked by coarse words, especially used in front of women or children.

I am dismayed to see on public display, on TV and in the street, and in normal conversation, things and events which would once only have been available to shamefully seedy men in shady back-street shops. I don’t want to watch other people having sex.

I also experienced the 1960s and their aftermath, and saw the dreadful, often tragic things that happen when men and women abandon the old rules of fidelity and constancy, and wrongly imagine that total freedom leads to total happiness.

Since then, I haven’t been able to see why the wonderful new equality between men and women, which is one of the great changes for the better in our age, had to be mixed up with the militant destruction of marriage and the traditional family. I still don’t.

But many of those who claim to seek female equality have another, much fiercer objective. They actually see men as the enemy, the ‘patriarchy’, to be overthrown by all means necessary, and replaced by a feminised society. They also see marriage as a machine for oppressing women. Their objectives moved a lot closer last week.

This is why many of those who said they wanted equality also sneered at restraint and manners. They claim now that they want the restraint and the manners back (though the suspicion lingers that much of the current fuss is aimed mainly at making all men look wicked and grubby).

But where are such restrained manners to come from in our liberated society? They were part of an elaborate code of courtship and respect which was learned by example in the married family, and has now completely vanished. In our post-marriage free-for-all, why should we expect either sex to be restrained? All that’s left is the police or the public pillory of Twitter.

It was that old code which allowed us, unlike the Islamic world, to permit the happy mixing of men and women without black shrouds, veils and ‘no-touching’ rules so strict that they even rule out a male-female handshake.

Now it’s gone, what are we to do instead? I am angered by the public denunciations now taking place, not because I believe or disbelieve them (how can we know?) but because they make trust impossible.

Andrea Leadsom, whose own bid for the Tory leadership was destroyed by what I still think was the unfair twisting of her words, should know better than to engage in such things.

Wise men at Westminster will in future go about with chaperones, record and film all conversations with the opposite sex, require women to sign consent forms before meeting them, and certificates of good conduct afterwards. Nothing else will keep them safe from claims that they momentarily applied ‘a fleeting hand’ to someone’s knee.

Or there is always the other solution, the niqab, the burka and the segregation of the sexes. But sanity, the best remedy of all, is obviously unlikely to return any time in the near future.

There are REAL laws against smoking... maybe that's why kids switch to drugs

In secondary schools, illegal drug abuse is now more common than cigarette-smoking. Could this have something to do with the fact that the police (busy painting their nails) long ago stopped enforcing the law against drug possession?

And could it be connected with the generally defeatist ‘they’ll do it anyway’ attitude of schools and the media towards drugs?

By contrast, the Government tries quite hard to discourage cigarette-smoking, and uses the law to ban it in many public places.

Meanwhile, more bad news for the ‘marijuana makes you nice and peaceful’ lobby. The disgusting, callous killer Ryan Gibbons, who twice ran over ex-Naval officer Mike Samwell with his own car in front of his wife, was revealed in his trial to be a cannabis user.

Eventually the facts may just undermine the billionaire PR campaign being run to portray this nasty drug as safe and good.

On a former council estate in the Thames Valley, I saw this rather desperate little poster stuck to a front door, and wondered what tale of persecution and plain fear, at the hands of callous youths, lay behind it.

Is it too late to stop the encouragement of the American Halloween in this country? For many it is a night of misery.

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which contains the best explanation I have seen so far of what precisely is going on, and why Black applicants to Oxford are not doing as well as might be expected.

I note however that the school he recommends is an academically selective one, which is oddly allowed at 15 but not at 11 or 13, the ages at which many bright children from poor homes sink in the chaos of bad 'comprehensives. By 15 it;s too late for them, and by 18 (the other age at which academic selection is allowed and considered normal) even more too late.

This blog by Katharine Birbalsingh, head of the Michaela School,(full disclosure: Ms Birbalsingh and I have been taking part in a friendly running argument over many months over grammar schools) is also terrific:

I append below some relevant figures I obtained on Friday from Oxford and Cambridge Universities, which I display without comment, but on which I would welcome any information or explanation. I think both articles linked above may be helpful in understanding them.